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Sunday, August 1, 2010

Dirty Sexy Money: The Bridge (1.5)

So far, I haven't talked a whole lot about the Dutch George mystery at the center of the series. The arc hasn't taken hold of an entire episode yet, but the show has kept it as a neat little subplot in the background of pretty much every hour so far. The introduction of Simon Elder successfully humanizes the story, giving the mystery a little more gravitas than the random "one-episode enigmatic guest star" characters Nick has encountered previously.

Simon and Nick have an interesting dynamic, Simon seeing Dutch as a father figure (which should alienate Nick in the future), while Dutch seemingly saw Simon as a kind of surrogate son, somebody who followed him into the business and made it on his own. Nick is having to process all of this. Coupled with his abandonment issues, he now meets the stranger at the center of the mystery and the one person who appeared to know his father best, somebody who's essentially a richer, more charismatic version of himself.

The Bridge was all about the corruption of wealth. Jeremy and Juliet open the episode desperate to spend millions of dollars on their respective birthday parties, only to end up realizing that they haven't got a whole lot apart from the cash. Juliet's friends are duplicitious and a bunch of bottom-feeders, while Natalie has been lying to Jeremy about her pregnancy. It's a lonely existence, having so many people around them but few of them generally interested in them as people. In the end, they only really have each other, and the episode culminates in both finding a new perspective on their lives.

At the same time, Nick is faced with the cold truth that he hasn't dedicated time to what he pledged to do once he began work for the Darlings: charity. The overbearing guilt from that leads him to distance himself from the family a little more, instead of being at their beck and call twenty-four-seven. This should hopefully open the series up to greater story possibilities, moving away from the frantic, everybody-has-an-issue-of-the-week plotting the show has served up so far. B+